Harry Targ
(It is time to change from confrontation to
cooperation: End the New Cold War now. But
as David Sanger reports on the recently released 48 page “National Security
Strategy” document:
“But what leaps from the pages of Mr. Biden’s
strategy, which was drafted by the National Security Council with input from
around the administration, is a relentless focus on China.
Much of the military
planning described in the administration’s document is meant to counter China
in space, cyberspace and at sea. Each of those arenas requires very different
arms, software and strategies than the push to contain Russia on the ground in
Europe. The document describes a more aggressive U.S. effort to enhance
cybersecurity and urges work with allies and the private sector to “withstand
attempts to degrade our shared technology advances” by limiting Chinese and
other investment in the United States and controlling exports of key
technologies to China. “David
Sanger, “Biden’s National Security Strategy Focuses on China, Russia and
Democracy at Home,” The New York Times, October 12, 2022).
Beginning in 1969 President Richard Nixon, guided by
his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, fashioned a new policy toward
China; what became known as “playing the China card.” It was motivated by a
desire to push back and ultimately create regime change in the Soviet Union.
Cognizant of growing hostilities between the two large communist states, Nixon
and Kissinger developed this plan to play one off against the other. Central to
this policy was launching a diplomatic process that led to the 1979 US formal
diplomatic recognition of China. During the 1970s, the United States and China
supported the same political allies in various parts of the world, Southern Africa,
and Southeast Asia for example. The split in the Socialist world between the
Soviet Union and China significantly contributed to the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the weakening of socialism, for a time, on the world stage. Thus,
from a US imperial point of view “playing the China card” worked.
In a speech on Thursday July 23, 2020, Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo declared that the Nixon opening to China was a mistake. “We
must admit a hard truth that should guide us in the years and decades to come
that if we want to have a free 21st century, and not the Chinese century of
which Xi Jinping dreams, the old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply
won’t get it done. We must not continue it and we must not return to it.”
(Edward Wong, Steven Lee Myers, “Officials Push U.S.-China Relations Toward
Point of No Return,” The New York Times, July 25,
2020). If it is true that the Nixon/Kissinger foreign policy toward China did
in fact facilitate the weakening of socialism as a world force, why was the
former Secretary of State now calling “playing the China card” a mistake?
The answer to this question, or more broadly why is
United States foreign policy, from Trump to Biden, returning to a policy
hostile to China, perhaps creating a “New Cold War?” The answer has several
parts. First, as Alfred McCoy has described (In the Shadows of the American
Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power, Haymarket Books,
2017), the United States, relatively speaking, is a declining power. As to
economic growth, scientific and technological developments, productivity, and
trade, the US, compared to China particularly, is experiencing stagnation or
decline. China has engaged in massive global projects in transportation, trade,
and scientific advances and by 2030 based on many measures will advance beyond
the US.
According to McCoy, the United States has embarked on
a path to overcome its declining relative economic hegemony by increasingly
investing in military advances: a space force, a new generation of nuclear
weapons, cyber security, biometrics, and maintaining or enhancing a global
military presence particularly in the Pacific (what Obama spokespersons called
“the Asian pivot”). In other words, rather than accommodating to a new
multipolar world in the 21st century, the United States is seeking to
reestablish its global hegemony through military means.
Second, the United States is desperately seeking to
overcome the end of its monopoly on technological advances. In computerization,
transportation, pharmaceuticals, it is challenging Chinese innovations,
claiming that China’s advances are derived not from its domestic creativity but
from “pirating” from United States companies. For example, the prestigious and
influential Council on Foreign Relations issued a report in 2019 entitled
“Innovation and National Security: Keeping Our Edge.” The report warned that
“…the United States risks falling behind its competitors, principally China.”
China is investing significantly in new technologies, CFR claims, which they
predict will make China the biggest inventor by 2030. Also, to achieve this
goal they are “exploiting” the openness of the US by violating intellectual
property rights and spying. Therefore, the CFR concluded, since technological
innovation is linked to economic and military advantage and since US leadership
in technology and science is at risk, the nation must recommit to rebuilding
its scientific prowess.
Third, while the United States is engaged in
efforts at regime change around the world and is using brutal economic
sanctions to starve people into submission (such as in Venezuela, Cuba, Iran
and 36 other countries victimized by economic sanctions), China is increasing
its economic ties to these countries through investments, trade, and
assistance. And China opposes these US policies in international organizations.
In broad terms Chinese policy stands with the majority of countries in the
Global South while the United States seeks to control developments there.
Fourth, although Biden’s foreign policy as well
as his predecessors, is designed to recreate a Cold War, with China as the
target, a policy also embraced by most Democrats, there is at the same time
counter-pressure from sectors of the capitalist class who have ties to the
Chinese economy: investment, global supply chains, and financial speculation.
Moreover, sectors of Chinese capital own or have substantial control over many
US corporations and banks. In addition, the Chinese government controls over $1
trillion of US debt. For these sectors of US capital, economic ties with China
remain economically critical. In addition, some writers, such as Jerry Harris,
point to the emergence of a “transnational capitalist class” whose interests
are not tied to any nation-state (Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy,
Clarity Press, 2016).
Consequently, while the trajectory of US policy is
toward a return to cold war, there is some push back by economic and political
elites as well. Although with the emphasis on domestic investments in
technology highlighted in the 2022 National Security document mentioned by
Sanger, it appears the advocates of a New Cold War with China seem to be in
control of US foreign policy. (The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 reflects this
renewed commitment to technological advance in the United States).
Fifth, American domestic politics provide an
additional cause of the transformation of US/China policy. The popularity of
the Democratic Party and President Biden remain low. Therefore, a classic
antidote for politicians experiencing declining popularity is to construct an
external enemy, “an other,” which can redirect the attention of the public from
their personal troubles. It is this external enemy that becomes the source of
domestic problems in political discourse. In this context the President is
talking tough with the “enemy” of the United States, and, as former Secretary
of State Pompeo suggested, it was about time that the US government gave up
illusions about working with China.
Finally, the ideological package of racism, white supremacy, and American Exceptionalism so prevalent in United States history resurfaced in dramatic ways in the Trump years and continues today. White supremacy at home is inextricably connected with American Exceptionalism abroad. For example, President Theodore Roosevelt in 1910 claimed that the white race has been critical to civilization. Years later Madeleine Albright, the Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration (and more recently President Barack Obama) spoke about the United States as the “indispensable nation,” a model of economics and politics for the world. For President Biden, the US stands with “democracy” against the world’s leading “authoritarians.” This sense of omniscience has been basic to the ideological justification of United States imperial rule.
Each of these elements, from the changing shape of economic and military capabilities to political exigencies, to the pathologies of culture, require a peace and justice movement that stands for peaceful coexistence, demilitarization, building a world of economic justice, rights of people to determine their own destiny, and inalterable opposition on to racism, white supremacy, and exceptionalisms of all kinds.
